THE REAL VODOU BEHIND VOODOO By Burke Bischoff
PHOTO: ALEXEI KZANTSEV
Sallie Ann Glassman, co-chair of the New Orleans Healing Center and owner of the Island of Salvation Botanica on St. Claude Avenue, is an initiated mambo asogwe, or high priestess, of Haitian Vodou. Born into an ethnically Ukrainian-Jewish family, Glassman showed a desire for spirituality since she was young and didn’t discover what was right for her until she went to Haiti. “I started doing tarot and created my own cards when I was at least 14,” Glassman said. “I started studying yoga and Eastern religions and got involved with a Western occult ceremonial magic order. That didn’t really appeal to me that much. But through that order, I discovered the work of Maya Deren, who was an experimental filmmaker and a dancer. She had made a documentary of footage she had taken in Haiti called Divine Horsemen, and I was just enamored with her work. And I found myself being involved with Vodou and ultimately doing a tarot deck, the New Orleans VooDoo Tarot, and that kind of opened up the door for me to go to Haiti and initiate, which I did.” Glassman explained that the Vodou ceremonies that she and other priests/ priestesses in the Haitian religion perform are not at all what is portrayed in movies and popular culture. Mainly through the act of drumming, singing, and dancing, the focal point in each ceremony is the arrival of spirits, referred to as loa, that
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Halloween Issue | Where Y'at Magazine
Ask someone, local or not, what “Voodoo” is, and you might get mumblings of dolls, gris-gris, magic, and herbs. While those are popular images of what most people think of as Louisiana Voodoo, there is so much more to the story of how a version of these traditions came to the Big Easy. What started as West African Vodun in what is today Benin and Togo, modern Louisiana Voodoo owes more to the religion of Vodou, which was formed in French-controlled Haiti.
essentially take over the ceremony, talk to the congregation, and offer advice and healing. “I think everything in a Vodou ritual is about the technology for opening the doors between the invisible and visible worlds and allowing the two to exchange and influence one another,” Glassman said. “And to an outsider, it might seem like something supernatural is going on, but Vodou is extremely natural. Through the effect of the drumming and the singing and the dancing, which is very precise and very complex, a doorway is opened, and another frequency is established. It allows a particular power or intelligent energy to come through that we think of as a type of spirit.” According to Glassman, during the transfer of the religion from West Africa to Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) and then to New Orleans, a mixing of traditions took place that helped Vodou to take root in the Catholic-dominant city. During Haiti’s French colonial period, the practice of Vodou was outlawed, and the French would give slaves lithograph images of Catholic saints to try to convert them. “In those images, they saw symbols that they recognized from the spirits that they observed in their homeland,” Glassman said. “And initially, these images were used as a mask or a blind to cover the spirit that they were actually serving. One
